Mjollnir was no longer luring Hellboy in one direction or another, but in some ways it haunted him more than ever. There was a presence inside him, lurking at the back of his mind; it felt like he was waiting in line for something with this rude, extremely impatient entity staring over his shoulder, urging him on. He felt like throttling the big barbaric bastard, but there was no way he could get his hands around the throat of some spiritual echo, especially when the only body it had at the moment was his own.
- Title: Hellboy: The Bones of Giants
- Author: Christopher Golden
- Genre: Horror-Fantasy/Superhero
- Year: 2001
Lately, I’ve happily gone a bit mental for Mike Mignola’s Hellboy, and there’s just acres of stuff left for me to discover in this multi-media series that could perhaps be described as ‘Noirish Lovecraftian Pulp Superhero Mythological Adventure.’ Or something like that. The thing is, Hellboy isn’t really like anything else, borrowing heavily from a slew of genres to create an iconic composite that feels somehow completely fresh — a stylishly confident synthesis of everything that is cool in horror and pulp fiction.
The Hellboy series spans live action and animated movies, comics (of course), video games, books, and probably a few other media I’m not even aware of. With most adaptations of Hellboy you’ve got visuals to work with — Mignola’s distinctive art style is anchor enough to base any one of a number of things off of, whether it be the composition of a film scene or a new design for his familiar characters. The Hellboy tie-in novels have a harder task in my opinion, that of trying to evoke the same themes and tone without aid of the strong visual assets of the franchise.
Characterization becomes the key, then, to delivering the goods in a satisfying way to Hellboy fans who pick up one of these books, and Christopher Golden has proven excellent in capturing the gruff, blue collar attitude that makes Hellboy such an endearing character. To date I think The Bones of Giants is Golden’s best Hellboy book, one that combines all the familiar ingredients of the Hellboy universe with just the right mix of action, mystery, mythology, and weirdness. Golden’s Hellboy behaves exactly as one would expect, and the tone of his narrative skips between the irreverently humorous and the awesomely strange just as it does in Mignola’s comics.
The Bones of Giants takes on Norse mythology; when Swedish archaeologists discover the frozen, preserved corpse of an enormous man north of Stockholm, Hellboy and Abe Sapien are dispatched to investigate. The corpse, bigger than any man, clutches an immovable war hammer — and anyone even slightly familiar with their Nordic gods can immediately guess just who our mystery dead person is. Hellboy grabs the hammer to investigate and is struck by lightning — fusing the artifact to the stone of his hand. The hammer, of course, is Mjollnir, and is the source of the visions and voices that soon plague Hellboy, strange memories of an age of gods and monsters. . .
The plot unfolds swiftly from that point, with Hellboy and Abe encountering all manner of strange mythological beings, from undead Frost Giants and Valkyrie to Svartalves and Nidvallim — decidedly unTolkienesque elves and dwarves. Hellboy must stop a kind of second Ragnarok from destroying the present age and ushering a return to an age of myth and legend, all while dealing with the changes that threaten to overwhelm his sanity. The big red demon himself is being possessed, and from the massive war hammer fused to his hand and the title ‘Thunder Bearer’ his new, mysterious Nidvallim allies bestow upon him, it’s no stretch to guess just who is doing the possessing.
Golden’s text is further enhanced, in the edition I read, by numerous black and white illustration from Mignola himself. The whole package is a great way to get at the Hellboy experience, and perhaps an ideal introduction to the series for fans of detective or supernatural fiction who don’t necessarily have any interest in graphic novels and comic books. All the Hellboy books I’ve read have been a treat, and with great names in Horror like Tim Lebbon, Tom Piccirilli, and Christopher Golden contributing to the series it should be considered a cut above many of the bland media tie-in projects that line the shelves of today’s bookstores.
